See also: Alto

If you’re alternative to a 505 is a 5.5m, or a J70 or a Farr 40 then cost isn’t an issue and this won’t help you.  If you’re alternative is an RS400 then it will.

The value of a race boat lies at least as much, and probably considerably more, in the bits the builder isn’t responsible for - the class association, the race calendar, your local club fleets etc.

Not many people would spend £30k on a 505 if there was no racing to be had, but there is and it’s high calibre in glam locations.  Consequently it sells.  Similarly not many will spend £20k on a low spec 505 or Alto if there is no racing to be had - and there isn’t which is why they don’t exist. 

You can easily shave more than £10k off the price, just buy a good used one.

The problem seems to be people want brand new boats then say it costs too much...

Also a 505 has a fairly long competitve life, the cost of travel etc campaigning one probably puts the cost of the boat in the shade.

i) as they have got faster and faster, you need a bigger and longer course area to get the best of them which rules out a lot of venues where they would have been competitive in the past

ii) you need time and skill, or lots and lots of time to practice, to get the best out of them

iii) the purchase price is high but so is the gear price, you need good sails etc so the ££££ ramp up its not 'just' the initial buy-in costs

iv) the class has always attracted very good sailors which means they win a lot of handicap events which means the PY is well out of reach for many average or time-poor club sailors for the reasons of i, ii and iii above

Successful clubs and classes who are getting on with life quite happily will never be short of advice from outsiders who can't organise their own club or class.

Classic fleets are a different ball game.

You can buy a 'classic' Merlin for maybe £5k and learn a lot racing against the whole fleet.

Various fleets make an effort to encourage the older boats or low budget teams at club and champiohship level. It seems to me that in a fleet like the Merlins, you can have an identical boat to someone in the top few, and unless  you're fairly talented and committed, you're not coming in the top ten. But people still enjoy it and get a lot out of it at their own level. Just like most other sports, most people who run in marathons know damn well they're not going to win.

Spending £20k for a second-class boat, just because you want 'brand new' would say an awful lot about what's wrong with younger sailors today.

The irony is, it's the hull development that's gone into 505's which sets them apart from the likes of 470s, which have a competitive life measured in hours and end up only campaigned by national teams with big budgets.

Great as the 50 is, hull design has moved on in the last 50 years, if you want a new class, there is no good reason to start with the 505. If you want to attract 'club level' sailors, I suspect something more optimised for your avarage Husband/Wife team would give you a better market.

And the official reason given for restricting 470 building to polyester resin only is to keep costs down. You couldn't make it up

OK boomer 

FYI Paul is too modest to mention that he is a multi-class national champ so I’m sure he is not advocating a second-class boat.  Saving £10k and only going 1% slower seems good value to me, but I suspect there is always space for the “ultimate” class for the wealthy to play in.

Spending £20k on a boat to do that is not clever.

1%  is a lot of boatlengths at the first mark and 'bye then'.

You could have 3 brand new Lasers ILCAs for that and no excuses.

Many years ago, I used to know a 505 sailor, not wildly wealthy, but traded up to a new boat every 4 years or so. Back then he said a five-oh had been 'roughly the price of a new Mini' for a decade or 3. Not so different now.

Some people might need to look around and see that a Mini as 'optional spending' is not exactly the extreme of excesses of the uber-rich degenerates.

There are plenty of classes with fixed gear, 49er, 800 spring to mind.

Now I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

Mike is an Essex boy who went to a 505 worlds in America( having just won the UK Nationals at Lyme), fell in love (not sure if the lady is Mrs Holt now)and now lives there.

But he is still an Essex boy at heart and a really good bloke.

He has been sailing 505's for ever and really knows how to make them win and as Clive said multiple world champ. Believe he owns one boat in Europe and one in California.

Surely, has to be this way, or a boat with multiple crew from different countries would have an alphabet soup spread over its mainsail

Don’t think so , unless he is moonlighting as the ‘ editor’ on sailing anarchy lol.

Seriously the writing style was different and the authors sailing history mentioned in the article also didn’t seem to match.

But you never know 

But - having broken cover to set the record straight that it wasn't me, a couple of other clarifications.

Jim C had it spot on when he said that this has been tried before and yes - the idea went nowhere.

The Alto.. now this was a lovely boat that a great deal of thought had gone into with regards the layout and so much more, but in other areas the backers of the project showed a distinct degree of naïve thinking, and not a great deal in terms of strategy for the commercial positioning of the boat. Now I was -still am - a fan of the Alto and would love to have seen it do better than it did, but that said, it was nowhere near  being on a par with a FiveO, and to somehow insist to the contrary just shows a lack of understanding of what the 5o5 is all about.

And finally - thank you to grumpycat for the recognition of a 'style' - I hope that I can repay the compliment with a couple of upcoming articles that currently have the working title of 'Taking the P'... with P meaning different things in different article. But the one that I've just completed  looks a how much it costs to take the P and the bare bones of the 'complaint' about the cost of a new 5o5 is  broken down and examined in more clinical detail. The beef about the escalating costs were daubed on the wall in International Graphspeed the summer before covid and my article was 2/3rds written before I heard about the post over on SA ( I rarely visit that site, you won't find me posting there).

I'm off now looking at Part 2..Taking the P (out of Performance) which I'm sure will have you reaching for your keyboards, who will be first, Mr. Angry of Hythe and Saltwood leads the odds at 5 to 2 on right now!

Dougal

Graphspeed....all that wet and dry, the mess - a bad start or a fluffed tack and what difference did it make!!

D

To break into crowded dinghy market , A boat has to be better/or offer something different to the boats already on the market. Then most importantly they need to be marketed really well to enable a class association to be formed with a large group of owners.

The Alto did none of these things.

It wasn’t killed , it committed suicide. 

The thing with PY racing, like most handicap racing, is that it works OK with 'similar' boats.

Una rig singlehander against una rig singlehander. Asy trap boat against asy trap boat.Slow boat against slow boat. When you try using any simple yardstick for asy against sym kite (or any other missmatch of categories), you can almost always predict the result if you know the wind and course.

The Alto was doomed as a PY boat, because it did not fit into a suitable category. IIRC one blitzed everything at Camel Week one year when conditions suited, but every other outing ended in whining about PY?

 

Utter tosh as always. 

The Icon had a hard py because it’s creator was the only person posting most of the race results to the py committee. And he is a very above average sailor . 

If you or I had been sailing it and produced the data , it would have had a very easy/soft handicap. 

But it still wouldn’t have been a success , because the marketing was s@@t . 

And that thats the bottom line , that you know more than most as you work in the trade. It doesn’t matter how good a boat is , if the marketing is c@@p , the boat is dead in the water . 

You cancelled your D-zero order on the day you were due to pick it up because ONE club gave it a py of 1010 . The official py is now 1029 and was from the start. (  the Great Lakes figure is around @1040 ) Given more sailors like me entering the class the official py will end up about 1040. Which was the figure Dan reckoned it would be at the start of the class. 

The fact the D-zero hasn’t been a bigger success has nothing to do with the PY and everything to do with marketing. Just look how many Aeros have been sold in the same time and they have the same PY problems. The PY system is not perfect but compared to everything you have ever suggested to replace it , IT IS 

This doesn’t make sense for several reasons:

1. The second sentence contradicts the first.

2.  How is the Alto not in the same “category” as, say, the 29er, 4000, Iso or 800?  

3. Most handicap racing is series racing, not the high profile one-off events. So whilst it is true that in a one-off race some boats are better suited to handicap racing, over a series (or series of series) being a Jack of all trades is no disadvantage compared to a being a strong wind specialist like a 420.

I am sure there are many reasons for the Alto’s ultimate failure to grow, but an inherent inability to perform on PY is not one of them. 

They won't even be on the same leg of the course halfway through the race. If there's any tide, that's not serious racing.

The Alto was a long hull that should be fast in light airs, with pivoting sprit for dead runs. Should be a light air bandit if it's done well. The 926 PY being whined about seems very generous compared to any of the boats you list, if you bear in mind it's a newer design from a quality builder which should have benefitted from looking back on all the 90s asy boat experience.

PY can only ever work well for boats which have similat characteristics. If you want to use it for kite boats against Lasers or Mirrors vs 505s, it will deliver a bit of fun on the water and results nobody should care about. Which is fine for a lot of people of course.

Magazines so last century ... 

PY is what it is.

Boat designers should well understand its limitations.

You really need to look at why people buy new boats in a new class.

How many are paying £10k or whatever to get serious about their PY results?

Anybody who's doing that needs to go and take up golf.

The proper way to start a new class is for a club to get 6 or more sailors to put their money up and task a designer with designing the boat. Unfortunately, that went out of fashion in about 1938.

The Icon was another underwhelming boat IMHO. A lot of sail area, a lot of hype, when seen on the water, I didn't really see 20 years of progress from the Tasar. Apart from a nicer mast. Where was the demand for a 2 person, 2 sail boat? What was it supposed to race against? I'm sure it would have been fine for team racing or fleet racing, in certain helm/crew weight/ wind strength constrainsts, but who asked for it?

Does the rest of the world race under PY? Which countries which don't have PY produce lots of vibrant new classes?

But - it matters not if it was on line or in chopped up trees (let's face it, where the man from Kent hails from, marking a clay tablet with a papyrus reed is the hot technology) I see no point in putting together any form of test. I've always told it as I see it and have various boot prints on the anatomy to prove this, but even if I gave a well considered, thoughtful review of a boat - such as the Alto, it would be mocked for no other reason that an intelligent, value driven piece of writing doesn't chime in with an individual's (any individual) belief system.

Actually, the Alto is a good example. I've sailed it, been Race Officer for it and saw it evolve from the basic concept of a 'modern' 5o5 and thought all along that it was a clever idea.  It had a quality builder and if you ignore the PY rants then it had a pretty good start to life. So why isn't the Alto  now part of our mainstream dinghy scene? For a start there isn't anything of a causal link between the PY and the commercial success and the rabid rants, whilst interesting, have next to nothing in the way of context. Nor do  statements that are thrown out there  mean anything - after all, WTF does  "the Alto reached 90% of the efficiency of the 5o5" actually mean? It is a pointless soundbite - how do you measure what is quoted as a hard number...90% efficient...  unless you set out the criteria of how this is measured and calculated and then, just possibly, people might sit up and pay attention.

Sadly, the seeds of the downfall of the Alto are so easily sown! I was recently asked to comment on another possible project, but it was only when I started asking the questions that the backers of the Alto should have been asking, before they first took a saw to the donor FiveO hull, only to get that same lack of any meaningful response, that I realised that this too would go the same way.

As Jim C can tell you from his historical records, new classes came and went well before the PYAG and some of them were good boats. Why did they not make it, when others did...now if IGRF could answer that, then we'd forgive you everything else.....

Dougal

This is how iGRF would like dinghies to be. If he had Thanos’s bejewelled glove he’d click his fingers and every two years, every dinghy would pixellate and disappear and we’d all start again. But I’d wager 80% of dinghy owners spend more on their berthing fee every year than on their boat. And that half the boats in dinghy parks have not had £100 spent on them in the last five years. A big contrast to sports boats.

Dinghies are where there’s persistent class racing. Dinghies are where heritage and history bring cachet. Win the 505 Euros or Worlds and you have you name on the same trophy as Paul Elvstrom and many other sailing legends (no one cares that you don’t care about these things Graeme, most do and that’s what matters). This stuff creates virtuous circles for classes; the competition is hot, which attracts more top sailors But who gives a flying @#£& if you win an Alto championship in a field of 5?

That hypothetical finger-click would not result in everyone buying a replacement, even if presented with the cash to do so. And even if they did, Merlins and GPs and Solos and RS200s would blossom again. They all work well in their niche. So would 505s, not Altos. The Weekender/Laser/Kirby-Torch/ILCA, maybe not, but the *ero holds little if any greater attraction to me personally.

Oh, and anyone buying (or not) any boat on the basis of it’s PY needs to get a life, frankly. 

 

^^^This.

Except maybe, if a boat does well against its PY at your club, just perhaps that's telling you it's the right kind of boat for the venue in some way? Maybe its optimum wnd range suits the venue, or the courses your club sets or the hull is right for the waves etc etc.

Also you can look at boats like the RS400 and see it has a fast PY for its size/type compared to most of its SMOD contemporaries, and maybe that tells you it's a well designed boat? Which might suggest it will be pleasant/rewarding to sail?

   But most classes have so little data to base a PY on, it's a joke.

Except Messrs Gilbert and McGrane who have dominated this winter. 

In a 505

 

If I had/have no choice I would go PY racing, but sailing in a 15+ one design fleet works better for me at all sorts of levels.  If It wasn’t for the strength of my local one design (Solo) fleet I would buy an H2 for £10k and race in our handicap fleet, the PY number would be of no interest.

My point is that if handicap racing is your only option then you could quite easily buy a lovely older 505 and have a blast … without the need to purchase a 50S

There are lots of people Sailing in lots of PY fleets, but how many of them are really there for the racing?  As in most amateur sports, a lot of people don't really care if some spreadsheet shows they came 13th. They want to get out there, enjoy doing the activity, get some exercise and compare their performance against their mates or their own personal goals. Just as lots of people buy expensive  bicycles to ride around with their mates..

  Surely most people who buy a Fireball or a Musto etc and race it in the PY fleet are mostly concerned about either  the challenge of getting better at sailing a technical boat, or their performance against either boats of the same class or very similar classes? Some people I would go as far as to say they buy a boat they like that's 'different' and really are not interested in having their personal performance compared to anyone else's. They want to buy a shiny toy, go sailing and socialise with a beer or two.

Indeed. Class racing is (was) the primary purpose for me, but those ‘special’ races endure in the memory. One such was a breezy winter series club race and we were chasing a good team in their Hornet. According to the PY they were a bit faster than us but in that breeze, on that day, the Fireball came into her own and we got past and made it stick. When their Hornet was replaced by a 5o the challenge became seeing how long we could stay in touch. 

However each to their own, so if resigned to handicap racing and PY in particular, I do participate in a bit of handicap racing, and my observation is that the cream invariably floats to the top, especially over the length of a series, which tends to cancel out the vagaries of wind and tide.  Also I have raced in PY races in probably ten different classes, and I am pretty sure that I have always finished in approximately the same part of the fleet, regardless of the boat.  I am unconvinced that The PY system can be significantly improved.

However, I look at the increasing number of mates who are happy to ruin a good walk by holding a stick and swinging it at a ball, and it strikes me that their activity relies on an arbitrary personal handicap system, and I wonder if this is what you are really looking for?  

1) sail the boat you like best.

AND.

2) Class racing is best .

Not sure these thoughts work well together .

For the record , I am definitely in the sail the boat you like best camp, not that a surprise to anyone to thats looks at my boat buying history .

PS If you want to know your place at the end of a handicap race, just sail pursuits. Simples .

Anybody spending ££££ on a nice boat and 'taking it seriously' in PY ought to take a short lesson in how PY is intended to work by the RYA and how it actually works in reality at your average sailing club. If you want to say your a better sailor than Fred in his Supernova, get a Supernova and give hime a proper race or STFU. Reality is, most of us have been around enough to know we're just club sailors and whether we're better than Fred is of no consequence. When we really want ot see how good we are, we get a Laser or a Merlin or (pick a fleet wth a depth of talent in...) and lose the excuses. Fact is, we're amateurs doing this for fun and you don't have to be 'winning' to get a lot out of it. Do you get a Traffic Warden's hat with 'Class Captain' on it?

As many know, I sail a 100, so most of my racing is club handicaps/pursuits too, although there is regularly another (well well sailed one) 100 too. And guess what; I’m heavier than my oppo when it’s windy i tend to come out on top and vice versa.

Originally posted by A2Z I’ve only ever lost to Dylan Fletcher on handicap. Nice to know he doesn’t have bragging rights on me! I don’t doubt class racing offers something that PY doesn’t, but your attitude of dismissing PY racing as unworthy and implying the foolishness of anyone who buys a nice boat if they’re not going to class race it is appalling. You should be ashamed.

I'm not saying anyone is a fool for buying a nice boat and enjoying it, but putting too much faith in what the spreadsheet  gives out is just for idiots who won't make the effort to see how PY works. There is absolutely no mechanism to correct for the talent gap between say Topper Topaz buyers and Merlin sailors. Get real, learn how the system works and enjoy it for what it is.

Of course aty the end of the day, in club amateur tacing, most people can do better, and pck up a bit of silverware, simply by turning up and finishing every race. Is that a bad thing? Doesn't worry me.

But before you all knew it he's swung the conversation around on i's head to become another utterly pointless tirade about PYs and lemming like we've all joined in his game (because that is all it is).

A shame - another potentially good debate ruined and discussion spoilt...count me out on this one.

Dougal

Back to the OP. Thinking on it, this is is actually being tested at the moment.

You can buy an ISAF plaqued ILCA for circa £7k or an event illegal Laser from Laser Performance for £4.8k. That's over 30% less, in line with the original question.

Is anyone knowingly opting to buy the cheaper version (that they probably won't be able to sell when the time comes)? I doubt it.

Isn't one of the things the Great Lakes mob do, to look closely at the PYs of classes with small numbers of races in the returns?  Basically, statistically any class that's putting in less than 1000 returned races is going to have huge 'error bars' on the best guess of its number. Some classes are getting PYs with only a handful of boats racing around the country. However flawed the RYA's number crunching may be, you can only process the data you have. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

It doesn't matter, I don't need a spreadsheet to tell me who had a good start, who went the right way up the beat, who capsized, who was fast down the reaches or who spent too much time getting in 'situations' with other boats. However wrong the PY numbers are, it's pretty rare to go to a club prizegiving and think whoever got the cup was hopeless and should have been mid fleet. Even in OD racing, the best sailor doesn't always win. It doesn't matter.

Hang on it's mid March, surely there's a discussion on the new PY list I should be worried about.     

But, back to the original point of the thread, you can buy a boat capable of winning the 505 Worlds for the same money as that mountain bike. With that, you get the option to race all over the world at venues like Garda, South of France, Cork this year for the Worlds, Santa Cruz next year against large high quality fleets.

The challenge for the class is to make sure enough people do buy new boats to maintain a supply of used boats for everyone's budget.

I had a look the other day. In the USA and Aus there's a reasonable range of 505s listed on the class website. But in the UK, there's no second hand 505s built this century, not that's unique, it's the same for virtually every class, sadly. Not even much choice on the ubiquitous ILCA. 

D

The simple answer to that is YES. If you are a weekend warrior, then the LP boat makes perfect sense. They cost only slightly more than a very good 2nd hand Laser/ILCA. If you keep the boat for 10 years or more then that is a small investment for a lot of racing in a new boat.

The assumption is that your club allows this, obviously.

I have no dog in this fight, to be clear.

I considered it myself, due to the shortage of half-decent used ILCAs.

The same money gets you a boat which some squad wannabe has beaten half to death at Portland, and on the M3 every third weekend for the last 4 years.

Decided to 'wait and see' though.

There are some 505s for sale on Facebook which ought to provide some club level fun and learning for someone. For less than it would cost to upgrade my old Laser.

and a boat that weighs very little

but doesn't fall over when left in the water unattended

and doesn't have control lines he doesn't understand

and has a user-friendly assymetric not a 'proper' spinnaker

and can be sailed competitively, single handed, by someone under-height and under-weight

and has been invented in the last 3 years

and has a bandit handicap

and is a monohull dinghy

But you cannae change the laws of physics

I'd like a rich, tall, fit supercrew (who understands gybing centreboards) to buy and fund my 505 helming for them. I'd not want a 505SE (in iPhone-speak). But weirdly I'm not the deluded one.

"Prism of delusion" is going straight into my favourite phrases list, Jimbo

I do understand the reason for the monster kite and trick foils, so I can see why a 505SE for new money wouldn't appeal to a really (but not quite top 1% no judgement intended) competitive racer and not many others would stump up new money for simply fun. But setting the 505 circuit aside I've crewed one pre-monster kite and they are a lovely boat in that form and bonus, modest sized people can crew them and even reach with the kite. In the 90s I knew of two husband and wife teams who regularly sailed on the N. Sea off East Anglia both in club handicap and class meetings.    There could be some mileage in unofficial old rules classic FiveOh sub group. I guess they are old enough for CVRDA meets.   

edit add. I'm thinking  "waste not, want not" I know some of the ones with wood foredecks might be beyond hope but in the main they were built strong as.

 

Lets not give Graeme any more air-time on his ever-boring PYAG Conspiracy Theory. 

Anyhow, back on topic ..

I doubt that a 505SE would shave £10k off the pice. and even if it did, thats still a whopping £20k to lay down. So you are still in the comfortably-off-persons toy price band, and no real marketing machine behind it to make it the latest must-have - so essentially a very niche market anyway. And you would always be wanting the real machine when at a full-monty 505 event. So you would spend £20k on a used full-fat 505 wouldnt you?

(I had 2 x 505's in my much younger fitter days and had the bestest time ever sailing them, even though they were 2nd hand)

Your second point regarding decent used boats is very pertinent to other classes as well.  There seems to be either no newish and decent used boats for sale, so, ordering new is the only option.  Or  settling for some pretty aged boats that are not going to be competitive.  I've been looking at the Hadron H2, the K1 keelboat and OKs and maybe a Phantom.   Perhaps its like the used car market where even ropey stuff is now fetching big bucks?

All I can say is the D-zero exceeded my expectations in every way 

Which is a good job as I weight two stone heavier than I did back in 2016 .